Principal Quality Engineer
Lawn Starter
Principal Quality Engineer
Lawn Starter
Marketplace for insured lawn care pros
LawnStarter · Mexico (Remote) · Full-time · Posted 2026-10-26
Salary: USD 80,000–100,000
Workplace: remote
Department: Engineering
About LawnStarter
LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, with over $150M in annual bookings. We're expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services.
About Engineering Quality at LawnStarter
Our QA team is growing, and we're investing real money in better test coverage. We already have shared quality standards and a QA squad that organizes itself horizontally across teams. What we don't have is someone dedicated to owning that vision: every QA is heads-down on their own team, so nobody has the room to drive the standards forward, unify how the squad works, or push the state of the art. That's the gap this role fills. It's not a nice-to-have we're adding because things are going well. It's the structure and leadership we need to make what we've already built actually compound.
The Role
You'll be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. We already have quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling in the mix. Nobody owns the vision behind all of it, drives it forward, or leads the QA squad that keeps it running. You will.
This isn't a QA management job today. You won't spend your day approving tickets or chasing bug counts. You'll take ownership of the standards and tooling that already exist, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve them, and keep pushing the state of quality engineering forward as the org grows. As the QA squad grows, this role could take on direct people management of QAs, so hiring, coaching, and performance management experience is a real plus even though it's not the day-one job.
You're not starting from zero, and you're not inheriting a mess either. That means the job isn't "invent a strategy nobody has thought about." It's "listen to the QAs who live in this every day, understand where the pain is, and lead them toward what's next." We need someone who reads where LawnStarter is today and builds from there, not someone who shows up with a favorite tool stack and a coverage number they picked before they met the team.
What makes this role different:
What You'll Own
Problems to Solve
A solid quality bar with no one steering it.
We already have shared standards, working quality gates, and AI tooling in the mix. What's missing is someone whose job is to look at all of it, decide what needs to improve next, and actually drive that improvement instead of it being everyone's part-time responsibility.
A QA squad with no dedicated leadership.
Our QAs already organize horizontally across teams, but every one of them is focused on their own team's work day to day. Nobody has the bandwidth to unify how they work, spread what's working on one team to the others, or represent their pain points where decisions get made. You'll give that squad the structure and leadership it's missing.
Standards that need continuous R&D, not a rewrite.
The foundation works. The risk is standing still while the org grows. You'll keep pushing the state of the art, testing new approaches and tools, and deciding what's worth rolling out broadly versus what stays an experiment.
Quality work that's still someone's side project.
Right now, improving quality practice competes with each QA's day-to-day team commitments. You'll make it someone's actual job to carry that forward, and get engineers, EMs, and PMs treating it as planned work instead of something squeezed in.
What Success Looks Like (Year 1)
Who You Are
AI-native, specifically for quality work. You already use AI to generate tests, not just to autocomplete code. You've set up agentic tooling like Claude Code or MCP-based workflows so engineers can run on-demand test generation or code review against their own repos, and you keep experimenting with what AI can take off a team's plate next. This is unlikely to be a good fit if AI tools mostly make you nervous, or your use of them stops at your own personal productivity.
A strategic thinker, not a tool zealot. Give you a team's current maturity level, and you'll design the testing approach that fits where they are, not the one you used at your last job. You resist the urge to mandate a specific framework or a specific coverage number before you understand the context. Someone who shows up insisting "we need to hit 90% coverage" or "everyone must use Playwright" without first learning how the team works will struggle here.
Deeply hands-on across the whole test pyramid. You've built and maintained component, contract, API, E2E, and performance test suites yourself, not just reviewed slides about them. You're the person who steps in when the engineering team is blocked by the pipeline and can't ship. If your test automation experience stops at reading dashboards other people built, this role will feel out of reach fast.
A patient teacher who still ships. Coaching engineers on testing practice and running enablement sessions is part of the job. So is personally building the CI pipelines and the tooling. You don't write the doc and hope someone else implements it. This is unlikely to be a good fit for someone who only wants to advise, or who avoids hands-on infrastructure work.
Comfortable owning influence without owning headcount, at least for now. You'll mentor QA engineers across every squad on technical craft and send notes to their EMs for performance reviews. You won't be their manager on day one, and you won't set their career path. This works well if you're motivated by discipline-wide technical influence. It won't if you need direct reports from the start to feel engaged. If you've hired, coached, and managed performance for a QA or engineering team before, that's a genuine plus: this role could grow into managing the QA squad directly as it scales.
This Role Is NOT
Compensation & Benefits
LawnStarter provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics. We comply with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.
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Marketplace for insured lawn care pros
LawnStarter operates as an online marketplace that connects homeowners and property managers with local, insured lawn care professionals who provide services such as mowing, aeration, landscaping, pest control, irrigation, and tree care. Customers book services online, track orders, and leave feedback, while LawnStarter verifies providers and ensures they are insured. The company earns revenue by taking a commission from each transaction and by offering a subscription for regular lawn maintenance. It differentiates itself through a vetted network of insured providers, a streamlined online experience, and community initiatives like the Lawntrepreneur Scholarship. The goal is to make lawn care easy and reliable at scale by delivering high-quality service through a transparent, tech-enabled marketplace and to support the next generation of lawn care entrepreneurs.
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